Thursday, December 20, 2007

New Frontier

Holy f*k, Batman! That looks amazingly cool. I just reread the two volume collection of New Frontier and just loved it, and have been getting caught up on other Cooke work (still don't know how I feel about his Spirit work, tho).

Looks awesome. Have you seen the Superman Doomsday yet? It got so many negative reviews that I didn't Amazon it as I had planned and thought I'd wait for your thumbs up, thumbs down, given your affinity for the Big Blue.

Well, I just watched Superman: Doomsday over the holidays, and well... It's not the best thing ever. Some nice bits (my favorite was Superman's throwaway line about having created an invention that could "pick up faint transmissions from the future..."), some really nice character designs and animated postures/gestures/etc (I particularly liked the way that the leaner Lex Luthor slinked around), but in the final analysis... not great. Partly it's the source material, which is far from Superman's finest outing, however familiar it is to so many readers. Partly it's that the whole thing seems somewhat oddly paced. Jimmy Olsen's turn to the dark side seems to come somewhat out of left field, and Perry's apparent descent into drink isn't mentioned again after being lobbed at the viewer. I didn't mind much the recasting of the voices, but while some of the redesigns were fine, others were less welcome, Superman himself coming off as a bit gaunt. And while I understand that it was a mandate from above that each of these new Timm-produced direct-to-video movies should be standalone, having yet another animated Krypton origin (on top of the recent new-view-on-Krypton just seen in the Legion of Super-Heroes cartoon show) seemed somewhat unnecessary.

Your mileage may vary, of course, but I found it somewhat disappointing. Still breathlessly looking forward to New Frontier, though...

Finally watched Superman: Doomsday and concur with a lot of Chris's notes. Interesting adaptation from the original to a version of the Timm animated Superman style, the Alfred-like Superman robot aide, and the more sexy Superman/Lois relationship (haven;t they ever read "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" by Niven?).